[Seahawk]

When I retired from the Navy I went to work for the Army as an SES. I lasted about four months and decided I had had enough of large bureaucracies.

The Army folks were great, they really were, but the whole Pentagon swirl beat me down to a nub.

I decided to work only in small companies that I had ownership in and a say.

That and I wanted to work with people of my own choosing, who have the intellectual capacity, like me, to admit when they are wrong. Life is not a zero sum affair, mistakes will be made.

I got out of the day-to-day management of a company I currently own 35% of two years ago because one of the partners became a self-licking ice cream cone. We took the company basically from the grave to nearly $7M a year in revenue at terrific margins. It is a shame, really: Our revenues are now down over 50% since I left. At the shareholders meeting a month ago the numbers were not good and the natives got restless, asking me to return.

I am thinking about it but I probably won't. I do not miss the travel and I may have someone who wants to buy my common shares if we can restructure "leadership".

My current company that I bought into when I left the other one is just a fantastically flat, open, honest group. We just finished a engineering meeting with a project we are doing for the Army: A bunch of little UAS inside a ground launched missile...the SWARM is ejected from the missile at a predetermined point and the little UAS have about 35 minutes to go do some really cool stuff.